Representative Men: Nature, Addresses and Lectures, Volumes 1-2

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McKay, 1892 - 642 pages
 

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Page 76 - Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.
Page 92 - The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, — he has always the resource to live.
Page 48 - When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen ; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.
Page 4 - Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe ? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of...
Page 52 - Take, oh take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn ; And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn : But my kisses bring again, , bring again, ' . -' Seals of love, but seal'd in vain.
Page 89 - The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which ". experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is " converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.
Page 170 - The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed ; they are vascular and alive.
Page 104 - ... street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; — show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing...
Page 11 - In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
Page 48 - It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote ; but to lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit ; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect.

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